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2 The Difference in the System of the Self: A Philosophical Contribution to the Gender Approach Béatrice Faye Introduction The place given to the difference between the sexes is a ‘blind spot’ in the teaching of philosophy, as it is in the history of ideas in general. Philosophical language is the language most strongly marked by the masculine. The ‘major writers’ or the ‘major systems’ are studied, but no attention is paid to the positions they have taken on questions concerning this matter. With many philosophers, an unquestioned hiatus is left between reflections on man in general and any reflection on the sexual division concerning the place and role of women, and also their cognitive, moral and aesthetic capacities. The power that men have over them is explained in terms of a balance of force (physical force) that is inherent in nature, which the making of laws may organize and regulate, or even change, but never abolish. This involves the belief that since the beginnings of mankind, men have had the biological privilege of regarding themselves as the only sovereign subjects. For Francoise Héritier, ‘There is little doubt that masculine physical superiority and above all the burden women have to bear, and their forced immobilization and weakening during the greater part of their life, have been the basic causes of the origins of humanity’ (Héritier 1978:387). In other words, the dualism of the sexes is based on the reality of the body. Later on, ideologies took over this original dichotomy and extended it to every part of life and to every distinct aspect of knowledge. Global Exchanges and Gender Perspectives in Africa 14 There are thus two main aspects in the relationship between women and knowledge, the first a socio-historical one, which studies the mechanisms by which women were kept away from knowledge or from certain areas of knowledge, or were only admitted to them as simple executants or disseminators, but never as creators. The second aspect concerns the use made of this knowledge. Does an examination of scientific knowledge from the parameter of sexuation transform one’s understanding of it? This approach has certainly been fruitful in the field of human sciences, since these sciences have human reality as a whole as their object, and because dealing with this by making a distinction between men and women and by analysing their relationships can throw fresh light on the subject matter. As Collin tells us: It is a decisive step to start considering a society, whether a traditional one or a Western one, by asking oneself about the place particular individuals occupy in it, by studying the structure of the family in the same way, including that form of the family modestly described as ‘one parent,’ or by introducing this parameter into the statistics. Philosophy, history, sociology, and even economics can be enriched or even transformed by this (Collin 1992:19). In a well-known schema that is inscribed in psychoanalytical thought, masculine knowledge can have affinities with detachment, cutting off or with separation, while feminine knowledge has affinities with the global. Men can thus isolate one element of reality, project it away from themselves, and then devote themselves to it, while forgetting or ignoring whatever is connected with it. Women on the other hand do not consider detachment to be anything but a passing moment. ‘In this perspective, which can be called holistic, there is no hiatus between knowledge and thought, any more than there is between thought and love’ (Collin 1992:21). The invisibility or occultation of women in public activities demonstrates the privilege enjoyed by the masculine actor and his historically central position. In a more specific way, it can be noted how economic theories have generally nothing to say on how social relations affect economic development. There is nothing surprising in this, since conventional economics is poorly equipped to deal with the most fundamental questions about development. It is little better equipped to explain social relations between men and women. It represents more of an obstacle to any analysis of these relations than an instrument for carrying it out. This is why feminist thinking, which is accustomed to endless deconstruction and reconstruction, can use gender as an analytical tool. Let us briefly recall that gender (genre in French) appears to be one of the last of the hermeneutical concepts introduced by Western feminism (Collin 1992).1 It was not invented by us. We can find the inspiration for it in anthropological...

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